28th July 2000 Archive

Back in June we revealed that Taiwanese OEMs were holding off implementing the first rev of the Pentium 4, because only two or three quarters after introduction, which we believe will happen in September, the Tulloch chipset supporting a 479 pin version of the microprocessor will supersede it.

A few dates and figures escaped from Microsoft's briefing for financial analysts yesterday, which largely returned to recent presentations. But Whistler will be called Windows 2000 Consumer, and a beta is promised "soon"; the Windows 2000 DataCenter will ship on August 11; the delayed Windows 2000 Service Pack on August 1; and the X-Box SDK was made available for download. We presume by invitation only, as we couldn't find it on the X-Box site. More from us on Whistler later today.

Microsoft is poised to release the first beta of Whistler, the successor to Win2k, and is expected to hit the market in the second half of next year. We have of course heard this sort of stuff from Microsoft before, but when Windows division senior VP Brian Valentine delivered the hostages to fortune to journalists yesterday, he was likely speaking from a position of some confidence.

The US is retreating in the latest skirmish of the trade war with the EU, and will revise the controversial foreign sales corporation system that, according to World Trade Organisation rules, gave illegal export subsidies to the likes of Microsoft and other major US exporters. More than half of US exports go through FSCs, and it is estimated that in 2001, the export subsidies under the scheme would have amounted to $4.1 billion.

[Mike heard from a little birdie that AMD was expected to ship its 64-bit microprocessor, codenamed Sledgehammer as early as next month. He also heard that OEMs would introduced Sledgehammer servers in Q4 of this year. However the next day, he awoke to find a torrent of emails informing him he was totally wrong. Mike was then approached by the PR boys at AMD, unprompted. Of course, he wrote about that too. Here are just a few of those replies]

Microsoft will subsidise the street price of its X-Box games platform, due out next year, and is planning to spend $500 million in total on making the machine a success. The $500 million will cover subsidies, marketing and support to retailers and software developers, and will make X-Box Microsoft's biggest launch ever - according to Microsoft, that is.

You wait for a cybersquatting decision all day and then three arrive at once. Continuing the tradition of leftfield WIPO decisions though, the one loser out of the three was the only one whose name was actually used in its true form.

Will Asus have multiplier dipswitches or not? This is the question of the moment in hardware land it seems. The self described "peanuts" down under at Insane Hardware have gathered some info and posted it for your perusal here

[We were contacted by a man who informed us he had brought down bt.com, btinternet.com and gameplay.com. He told us he'd done this because he was sick of BT's service. We ran with it in last week's letters and then this week found the program he had used for the attack. The letters kept coming]

The EC has agreed a deal with the US which patches up previous disagreements over data protection. The problem stemmed from the fact that the US relies on a self-regulation system for the security of personal information - Europe on the other hand has gone for a legislative approach.

[About half the emails we receive can be split into two categories. First, those that haven't read the article properly and so witter on about where we've gone wrong without realising we've answered that very question in the text. And secondly, those that read them far too carefully, or with a sense of humour bypass. Here's just a few from this week]

[This being the IT industry, a lot of the articles we write concern the US. And it being the US, we are occasionally faced will appalling examples of what that big ole country can kick out. Refusing to do anything but attack any examples of poor human behaviour, we therefore invariably print negative comments about you lovely American citizens. The vast majority take it with the humour intended but we also have a thing here at Vulture Central where we wait for the headcase redneck to email whenever such a story goes up. This one was sparked by the Letters page last week]

Nortel has publicly announced that it will buy Alteon WebSystems in a stock deal worth $7.8 billion. The company says that the deal will give it a big advantage in the content switching market as the transition is made to optical and wireless Internet.